


Meta: A Stardew Valley Fanfiction that is Meta, both because it’s title and content are Meta

by KidAbsurdity



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Absurd, Inspired by Fanfiction, Meta, Multi, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26207827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KidAbsurdity/pseuds/KidAbsurdity
Summary: One day, while posting a Solarion Chronicles fanfic, Sam discovers a section dedicated to fanfictions about life in Stardew Valley. How did this come about, and who is responsible?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	Meta: A Stardew Valley Fanfiction that is Meta, both because it’s title and content are Meta

**Meta: A Stardew Valley Fanfiction that is Meta, both because its title and content are Meta**

  
_____

"Sick," Sam said aloud to himself one Thursday night, as his parents and brother were out of the house. A hidden personal project, a Solarion Chronicles fanfiction, was finally done, and ready to post over on ArchiveOfFanfiction. The world would be ready to see his unique writing talents. Move aside, Elliott. "Sure it may not be the next great Ferngillian novel, but I put something out into the world,"" he thought. He paged through the site to upload it, missing a typo in his search query, and stopped cold. "What in the name of Yoba themself _is_ **this**?" Sam muttered to himself in disbelief as he scrolled through an array of fanfictions that matched neither his sensibilities nor his expectations. This was clearly all wrong, but how would he even articulate this?

_____

At the saloon the following night, their farmer buddy absent on some pressing family business, Sam, Sebastian, and Abigail were doing their usual hanging out in the game room, with Sam getting obliterated at pool as usual, when he decided to risk broaching the topic, sensitive as it was. Sam was no stranger to nerdy pursuits, he played Solarion Chronicles plenty with Sebastian, and also Abigail that one time, but it felt like the whole fanfiction thing may have been crossing over into something too nerdy even for this friend group aside from the shock of what he saw the previous night.

"So, guys..." he started before Abigail blithely cut him off:

"You know there are any number of words you can use that aren't gendered, right? Folks, friends, cowards, buddies, pals, and so on and so on and so on."

"Sorry," he replied with genuine contrition. He was new to trying to change that habit and still slipping up. "It's not just making an excuse, but I saw something yesterday that rattled me a bit, and I'm not as focused on that. I'll still make the effort, I promise."

Abigail accepted the apology with grace before Sebastian cut in.

"What would rattle you at this point? After walking in on your parents a couple of months back I'd have thought that you'd have maxed out on surprises." Sam shuddered at reliving the memory that Sebastian had just reminded him of. 

"Asshole," he indicated his displeasure with his best friend. "A great genderless term." Sam fell back onto the middle of the couch behind the pool table, pulling his phone out of his pocket. "Gather around, children, it's on the internet." This immediately worried Abigail and Sebastian, not because they hadn't seen their fair share of bizarro stuff on the internet themselves, but because it seemed out of character for Sam to go looking for that sort of thing, much less to find it. "Get a load of this..." he told them, showing them the phone in turn, first Abigail, then Sebastian.

"What the actual fuck!?" Abigail exclaimed, while Sebastian sat silently aghast. Like Sam the previous night, neither of them were prepared for the fanfictions involved.

"Why on Yoba's great green Earth are there a bunch of fanfictions about our town on ArchiveOfFanfiction?" Sebastian asked quietly.

Sam shrugged fiercely. "No idea, but there are hundreds of them, and what the screwiest about it is that it's a whole bunch of authors writing them. All of us are still, well, us, mostly, but almost each one involves a new farmer showing up in town."

"What do you mean, mostly?" Abigail asked him.

"Well, it's not exactly my place to judge, but like, damn, there is some serious collective Shane-thirst going on, and I don't mean that he drinks a lot, which, well, y'know, he also does, in the fics and IRL."

"Who?" Sebastian muttered.

"Mostly the various farmers, sometimes you, sometimes me, it's an incomprehensible sex-fest, but what's the most bizarre about it is that aside from everyone being pansexual sex maniacs, they capture our personalities well enough for me to wonder who's writing this and how they could know enough about us that this would even be possible."

Abigail snatched the phone away and scrolled through it. "There is also a not insignificant number of fics pairing the two of you off," she mentioned matter-of-factly.

"Yeah, I noticed. Pretty hot, isn't it," Sam said, draping his arm across Sebastian's shoulders while the programmer recoiled with great abruptness and Sam and Abigail laughed at his friend's expense.

"Not even funny," Sebastian told him.

"But yeah," Sam mused aloud, "I don't understand what could possibly be going on here."

"Why is this in the video game section?" Abigail asked, still looking at the phone. "Stardew Valley. Our region isn't the subject of a video game, and it'd be about the most boring thing if it was."

They all looked confused.

"We need to get to the bottom of this," Sam told them. "Right?"

Abigail and Sebastian didn't move.

"Right?" Sam echoed, to no response.

"Cowards," Sam finished, ensuring he didn't make yet another inappropriately gendered comment, as he snatched his phone back from Abigail and marched off toward the bar.

_____

As he arrived, he pulled up a barstool next to Shane, before gesturing to Emily to get her attention and order a soda and advance his understanding of the case of the curious fanfictions. "Hey you guys... uh, you two, rather. I've stumbled onto a mystery that involves the whole town."

"Lewis is seeing my aunt," Shane told him, assuming that was it. "I'd have figured you'd have known about that already."

"I did," Sam told him. "I thought everyone did by now, I mean, the farmer was oblivious about it for a while, but even then, this one's different, and a lot stranger, check this out." He showed them the phone, replete with several hundred fan-fictions of their lives in Pelican Town. Then, because neither of them were particularly savvy about what showed up on the internet, he took a bit of extra time to explain it to them.

"So what you're saying is that a whole lot of someones are writing embellished fiction about us and our lives in town, and publishing it on this website?" Emily asked.

"Uh, yeah, exactly." Sam replied. 

"But what is there to write about? It's not like we get up to all that much?" Emily asked, kind of missing the point of how fiction and reality lined up that neatly.

"Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the big themes from what I could see are: farmers swooping in to save the town and have a lot of sex with everyone, mostly Shane; and the rest of us all having a lot of sex of all varieties amongst each other too. There were some fetishes I wasn't even aware of." 

Shane initially looked repulsed as he glanced at the phone to see a string of fanfictions with the OCxShane pairing. He was torn between thinking that someone was having a cruel laugh at his expense, but also that someone, somewhere out there seemed to find him attractive, which he desperately wanted to grasp onto. As Shane thought about it, he realized that Sam seemed so genuinely confused about it that he got a bit swept up in the mystery himself, and veered more toward the latter option. Emily was also confused about it, if less judgmental. "That is very strange," she said. "It's almost like each of these stories are parallel universes where almost everything is the same except there's a new farmer."

"Yeah, and everyone being pansexual," Sam agreed, with a supplement.

"Yeah, that too," Emily admitted with a wink.

"But you don't have any idea where all this came from, did you?"

They shook their heads.

"Well, it would have to be one of us, or someone close enough to one of us to be able to know the town well enough," Shane suggested. "Doesn't Elliott write all the time?"

"Yeah, could be," Sam assented, surprised he hadn't thought of that right away. Sure, Elliott told everyone he was working on a novel, and maybe he was, but maybe some of his writing exercises included writing trashy fanfics. Stranger things have happened, like when Sebastian had put him onto Dr. Chuck Tingle's "Pounded in the Butt By My Own Butt". There were, it turned out, also a lot of fanfics involving stuff of the sort with him and Sebastian. The internet just could not appreciate a platonic bromance, Sam thought, though he had to admit that Sebastian was an attractive man. "Oh," he continued thinking to himself, "well that’s new and interesting."

_____

The following morning, Sam made his way down to the beach to confront the author before he could too easily fall into writing whatever it was that he was writing. The novel, erotic fanfictions involving the whole town, whatever it was. He cut past Alex on his jog and realized he was having a harder time keeping his attractions to people in check as he beelined toward the beach and Elliott’s cabana. He rapped sharply on the door.

“A moment please! I must just make myself decent!” Elliott called out from the inside, and a few moments later, he opened the door, surprised to find Sam there. They didn’t speak especially often. “Ah, Sam. This is quite a surprise, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Elliott, did you know that there are a prodigious amount of fanfictions of life in our town online?”

Elliott shook his head, gesturing at the interior of the cabana. “I’m afraid I don’t have a good sense of what’s online these days, lacking a computer as I am.” He also pulled an antiquated flip phone out of his pocket. “But do go on, please, I am intrigued.”

Sam showed him the section of ArchiveOfFanfiction, explaining that there were hundreds of stories of a new farmer arriving, all different, but with the supporting cast of the townsfolk largely the same. 

“I feel as violated as I do confused,” Elliott admitted aloud. “Not to mention that as they are fanfictions, I have no idea how any of us are objects of so many authors’ fantasies while we have never met them.”

“But wouldn’t we have to have met them, or someone they know, for knowledge of us to circulate?” Sam pressed him.

“I am a romance author, not a mystery author. And before you say so, not that kind of romance author - here, observe the differences in prose between my writing and these."  


There were so many words that Sam had never heard before. While Elliott may have potentially accounted for one of the fanfictions, he was too stilted in his style to account for all of them. It was back to the drawing board.

After another night at the Stardrop Saloon, having ruled Elliott out, the townsfolk who were in on the mystery had made no further progress as they discussed it amongst themselves. As the patrons left to return to their homes, and Emily was cleaning up the bartop, she let loose a sigh of relief that the mystery hadn’t centered its way onto her. Everyone came into the saloon with a story, and she heard most of them. It only took a bit of creative license to make her own. All it needed was a new farmer to drive the action, every time. It was easy to conjure up all sorts of different farmers that might have been, and she did in the years leading up to their arrival. The townsfolk may have been narrow-minded about a lot of things, but they weren’t so stupid that Emily would get away with this indefinitely, unless, if they were keeping up to date on the new fanfictions, she would be able to make one last misdirection. She sat down at the computer to write, as she often did winding down after a shift:

_ Meta: A Stardew Valley Fanfiction that is Meta, both because its title and content are Meta... _

_____

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I figured there are few things more absurd than posting a fanfic in a fandom I haven't touched in years, and making it this one. Enjoy!


End file.
